


A Sound of Thunder

by Euphorion



Series: Into the Spider-Verse Post-Scripts [1]
Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, F/M, Post-Canon, as in Spider-Gwen's version of things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 08:42:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17659505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphorion/pseuds/Euphorion
Summary: It probably wasn’t the most opportune time, but it was also the only time they had, so Gwen asked him about it halfway down the elevator shaft into Fisk Tower’s secret lab. Noir was leading the way, moving gracefully and monochromatically from elevator shaft to heating vent, Peter Porker in his wake.“Does she know?” Gwen hissed, knowing his mind—like hers—was still back in the dining room. “Your version.”“What?” Peter hissed back. “Know what?”“You know,” Gwen gestured from him to herself, crawling on finger- and toe-tip directly down a vertical concrete wall. “This.”“Oh,” said Peter. “Yeah, she knows.” He was smiling behind his mask, she could tell from his voice. “She's always known.”“Oh,” Gwen said. “Good.”+Spider-Gwen/her MJ. Title shamelessly stolen from Ray Bradbury.





	A Sound of Thunder

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Femslash February!! There are a lot of Peter feelings in this fic, you'll have to forgive me about that, but there are just so many of him in this movie. I promise I'll make up for it one day with GwenMJ that has no mention of men at all.

Gwen slid out the back door of alt-May’s house, closing it quietly behind her, then froze in the process of pulling her mask down over her face. Peter was crouched on the edge of the roof above her, just out of her range of vision.

She knew he was there because he moved, deliberately letting the sole of his stolen boot scrape against the shingles, not because her spider-sense warned her. It didn’t react to any of the other spider-people beyond that initial vertigo of recognition, apparently deciding they weren’t a threat. Gwen, remembering too many teeth in another Peter’s mouth, wasn’t so sure.

She didn’t know what to think about the fact that there were five versions of him, wrapped up in this mess, and only one of her.

“It’s not smart for us to split up,” he said casually, and she finally looked up at him. His mask was off. The bruising around his eye was almost gone—he clearly benefited from the same quick-healing she did—but he still looked. Tired. _Old,_ older than her version of him ever got.

“I don’t like group projects,” she muttered. “Nothing personal.”

His small almost-laugh, puffing silver in the night air, told her he didn’t buy that for a second. But he didn’t call her on it, just sat back, leaning on his hands and turning his face to the sky.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” she said, “before we head to the collider,” and snapped a webline to the nearest telephone pole.

“I know,” she heard him reply, and then she was flinging herself through the quiet streets of Queens.

She hitched herself to the back of the R train at Jackson Heights, crouching against the wind. It was cold but bearable, and out here, at this speed, the city blurred enough that all of the little details that made it clear it wasn’t hers faded away.

She ran up to the first car and swung herself down and back to the last, snatching the backpack of street clothes she’d left webbed to the pilon in the center of the span of the Queensboro bridge on the way. Landing back atop the car, she pulled the jacket and extremely cold jeans on over her costume, then shook her hair free from her mask.

She didn’t really know where she was going other than _away_ and _alone_ , but she slipped into the train and then out again at Times Square anyway. This is where she’d entered this world, after all, where the portal had deposited her, where the unnatural rift in space and time had dropped her as if to say, _here, come here and fix me._ Just another puzzle to solve, just another apocalyptic plot to stop, just another day in the life of Spider-Woman.

Except it wasn’t her world. Staring up at the Kokoa-Kola ads, the album covers of musicians that almost but didn’t quite exist in her world, she knew she wasn’t really needed. Miles was this world’s Spider-Man, or he would be once he had a little more time to get his act together. She would help him do that however she could, he was a sweet guy, and then she would go back to her world, and her life, where there were no versions of Peter Parker at all.

She got back on the train and went downtown.

It was late, nearly midnight, and the streets around Trinity Church were as empty as New York streets ever really got. A few bundled-up couples hurried past her as she stared at the cemetery gates, and she took a moment to just breathe, watching an old woman's small dog relieve itself on the flat-stone marker of someone's grave.

The graveyard itself was a mess of police tape and muddied snow. She saw signs of both a huge number of visitors and Miles’ tumultuous first meeting with Peter B. as she picked her way through it, but the figure standing at Peter's grave was alone.

She was wearing the same camel coat as she had on the church steps, and the light from the windows of the church caught her face as she turned. This close, the similarities and differences were both disorientingly clear. The line of her nose was the same, the set of her full mouth. The freckles across her nose that Gwen had always felt sort of special for knowing about were on full display, not hidden behind foundation. Her hair—cut short enough to curl beneath her chin rather than the long, straightened mane Gwen was used to—was just barely red in the low light, more blood than copper, but Gwen knew in sunlight she’d be ablaze.

Mary Jane turned from her husband’s grave, her eyes shifting across Gwen’s face, and then—catching, widening. She froze.

Gwen froze, too, her brain kicking into panic. They’d never said anything about her, none of them, not May, not Miles, not even the cartoon pig, none of them had seemed surprised to hear who she was but they’d never indicated they knew her—god, did this MJ _know_ her?

“Gwen?” MJ breathed, her eyes impossibly huge, and then the shocked stillness of her face broke, settled into a rueful, self-deprecating smile pasted nearly perfectly over the briefest flash of absolutely shattering grief. “No—I’m so sorry, miss, you just look like—like an old friend of mine.”

Gwen swallowed against the beating of her heart. “It—it’s fine,” she managed. “It’s fine, I, um.”

MJ’s smile shifted, inward to outward, and not for the first time Gwen saw how much better she was at wearing a mask than any of them. “Have you come to say goodbye?” she asked, indicating the grave behind her.

 _Yeah,_ Gwen thought, knowing it was true, _but not to him. Been there, done that._ She nodded.

MJ reached up and tucked her hair up into her hat, keeping it out of her eyes, looking at the piles of flowers and cards at her feet. “He’d be glad, I think,” she said. “Confused—I don’t think he understood just how much this city loved him—but glad.”

“It’s hard,” Gwen said softly. “When no one knows to thank you for your help, because no one knows you’re the one helping.”

MJ looked at her, her eyes narrowed, and for a moment Gwen expected to be called out— _you sound like you’re speaking from experience—_ but instead she just quietly corrected, “almost no one,” and winked.

Gwen felt herself go red, her face heating. “I—of course,” she stuttered, “I never meant—”

MJ laughed at her, low and wicked and so familiar it knocked the breath from her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice musical with it. “I don’t mean to tease, it’s just.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, you’re—different than most people I’ve spoken to, since.” She trailed off.

“People tell me I’m easy to talk to,” Gwen said. _You tell me I’m easy to talk to._

MJ smiled at her. “It’s late,” she said. “Neither of us should be out here, probably. Let me walk you to the train?”

Gwen shook her head. “I live nearby,” she lied. “I want—another second, if you don’t mind.”

MJ nodded, and stepped past her, lingering for a moment as their shoulders drew level, her eyes on Gwen’s face. Gwen felt herself flush again at the scrutiny, fought the urge to look away or close her eyes or, worst of all, pull on her mask. “Remarkable,” MJ said eventually, under her breath, and then shook herself. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Mrs. Parker,” said Gwen.

The corners of MJ’s eyes crinkled. “Watson-Parker,” she corrected.

Gwen laughed. “Of course,” she said, and fought the urge to touch this older, sadder MJ’s shoulder. It would be all kinds of inappropriate, and anyway with her luck she’d have a Miles moment and stick. “‘Night.”

MJ moved past her, vanishing into the darkness, and Gwen forced herself not to call after her, introduce herself, tell her everything. She stomped over to blond Peter’s grave instead, staring down at it, nearly buried in candles and gifts. Someone had clearly fixed it up since Miles and Peter B. had crashed into it; packed new snow in to hold it in place. She wondered what would happen when spring came.

She gnawed at her lip. Maybe she'd be here to find out.

“Who was I to you?” she muttered to the gravestone, to the quiet corpse beneath. “Who was I to her?” An old friend, MJ had said. Moved away? She snorted to herself. Doubtful, considering all of their lives.

Perched at the top of the hideous Osborne family mausoleum, Gwen Stacy googled her own name, and read, surprisingly dispassionately, her own obituary, posted a decade ago. Bright student, especially in the sciences. Will be missed by dear friends. Survived by mother, Ginger, no mention of a father. Killed in connection with the events leading to the arrest of Dr Curt Connors, with a link to a news story that Gwen clicked on and then immediately closed out of without reading.

She lay down on her back, one of her legs dangling off the ear of a grinning gargoyle. So in this one, she’d lost that fight.

She thought about Miles, his unfunny-but-smart joke about relativity, the video of Olivia Octavius’ theories on alternate dimensions. “ _There could be a universe where I’m wearing red—or leather pants!”_

 _Or where you’re ugly and male,_ Gwen thought. _Or where I’m killed by the same experiment that in the universe I know, the real universe, made me kill my best friend._

A butterfly flaps its wings, and someone, somewhere, has to die.

She tucked her phone back into her pocket and slid down a long-clawed hand extending from the side of the mausoleum. She landed sideways on a telephone pole, staring dubiously up at the structure. How anyone had any doubt as to the Green Goblin’s identity in this one, she had no idea.

She wondered if MJ had made it home yet, wondered if part of her still had the urge to leave her windows unlocked. Wondered what she would do if Gwen tracked her down and swung her way in, confirmed the resemblance, told her about other worlds where everything was different. Would she cry? She’d only ever seen MJ cry once--really honestly cry, anyway; she could tear up beautifully on command, and often did as a fun party trick. But this had been different, a shaking, sobbing, half-crazy thing Gwen couldn't transpose onto older MJ's face at all. Maybe eventually you grew up enough and lost the ability to cry like a wounded animal.

 _He was my neighbor,_ she'd said, standing by Peter's bedside in the hospital, several hours ahead of reality, putting their dying friend prematurely--but accurately--already in the ground. Gwen had touched her shoulder, then, wondered at the depth of her grief even through the crushing haze of her own, of her guilt, and MJ had reached up and grabbed her hand tight.

+

Peter B. was an absolute mess whenever MJ was even mentioned, and in a weird way it made Gwen feel better.

It probably wasn’t the most opportune time, but it was also the only time they had, so Gwen asked him about it halfway down the elevator shaft into Fisk Tower’s secret lab. Noir was leading the way, moving gracefully and monochromatically from elevator shaft to heating vent, Peter Porker in his wake.

“Does she know?” Gwen hissed, knowing his mind--like hers--was still back in the dining room. “Your version.”

“What?” Peter hissed back. “Know what?”

“You know,” Gwen gestured from him to herself, crawling on finger- and toe-tip directly down a vertical concrete wall. “This.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “Yeah, she knows.” He was smiling behind his mask, she could tell from his voice. “She's always known.”

“Oh,” Gwen said. “Good.”

There was a moment when she was pretty sure she was going to have to fight him as well as Ock and the Scorpion and Tombstone and Kingpin himself, was pretty sure she would have to throw him through the rift between worlds herself so his MJ could have him back. (And as for hers---well. She couldn't think about that.) But Miles burst resplendently into the fight, the new confidence looking almost as good on him as the artsy black suit, and for the first time in a long time she let herself stop worrying about the fate of the world.

She ended up in the middle of her own Central Park, barely managing to slow herself by pinging off a street lamp, skinned her shin badly landing on one knee in a snowdrift.

She picked herself up, soaked to the skin and bone-weary, and hauled herself up a fire escape on 81st. According to her phone it'd been only 24 hours since she’d been pulled away. She groaned; that was another day's absence to explain to school. And.

 _Do it tomorrow,_ she told herself. _It can wait. Sleep. Think it over._

But she knew herself, and in the morning she'd be half-convinced none of this happened at all, or at the very least that she was wrong about what it all meant. Wrong about what it _could_ mean.

She stood, rolling her shoulders, and flung herself east.

There was a tree outside MJ's window that she made herself climb like a normal girl, pulling herself up onto a branch she could sit comfortably on, tapped her knuckles against the window. Inside, MJ was sitting on her bed, a textbook open next to her, her phone in her hands. She was in pajamas, her hair tucked into a towel wrapped on her head. She looked—comfortable, unguarded. Beautiful.

At Gwen's second, more insistent knock, she looked up, surprised, and then slipped out of bed to open the window.

“Gwen? What are you doing here?” She blinked at her. “Wow, what did you do to your hair? And are you wearing your ballet shoes? Did you wear those on the subway?” She frowned. “Are you okay?”

Gwen pulled her gaze away from the little line between her eyes to glance down at herself. She'd pulled on the shirt and pants from her stolen Visions Academy uniform, but she hadn't kept the shoes. She felt her mouth twitch: at the absurdity of all of it, at the sheer relief of being recognized, known. “I'm okay,” she said. _Maybe better than._ “Can I come in?”

MJ raised an eyebrow at her, but shifted back and out of the way. “What are you, a vampire?”

Gwen snorted. “Not exactly,” she said, clambering through the window, “though there is the whole, being bitten and then your whole life is different. Thing. And I guess also the super strength—you know, there are actually a lot more similarities than I'd ever really considered.”

MJ had her arms crossed. “What—”

“I have something to tell you,” Gwen said, all in a rush, “no, wait, two things.”

Mary Jane looked at her, dubious. “You have two things to tell me that couldn’t wait til homeroom tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” said Gwen, “because they’re secrets.”

Mary Jane’s eyebrows rose. “Is this why you weren't at school today?”

“No—well. Yeah.” Gwen dithered for a minute. Should she swing out the window? And then what, come back immediately? Not very impressive. Finally she settled for walking over to the wall and then up it, stepping over Mary Janes’ posters from their own shows and then the light fixture on the ceiling until she was hanging upside-down, face to face with MJ.

MJ, who was staring at her wide-eyed. “You—”

“Yeah,” said Gwen, her stomach squirming.

“You’re Spider-Woman,” MJ said. “You’re a _hero._ ” Her voice was soft—almost exaggeratedly soft—and Gwen leaned back a little to properly take in her expression, the tiniest curl at the edge of her lips, the smallest scrap of amusement dancing in her eyes.

“You knew,” Gwen accused, shocked. “You’re not surprised at all!”

MJ burst out laughing, curling in on herself, her face so purely happy that it knocked Gwen sideways out of both her disbelief and her disappointment about her big reveal being ruined, left her light-headed and displaced and filled with an itching, an urging, a twitching sort of longing.

 _Yeah,_ Peter B. had said, voice smiling, _she's always known._

“Gwen,” MJ breathed, half-laugh, so absolutely different than the way her older self had said her name in a graveyard worlds away. “Gwendy, of course I knew.” She reached out, running her fingers through the short side of Gwen’s hair. “What else could possibly make you miss so much band practice?”

There was a moment in ballet and combat and web-swinging that Gwen had internally named Don’t Freeze, Idiot: the follow-through, the moment where you’re hanging in mid-air, either literally or figuratively, and if you don’t act—if you don’t reposition your legs, if you don’t snap out a fist or a webline—you’ll fall, and whatever place you were, whatever height or advantage you’d reached, will be gone. You’ll never get back there, not really, not there exactly, never be able to seize that exact moment. MJ’s hand was in her hair and her laugh was dying on her open lips and Gwen was absolutely a tumbling, anchor-less thing, free-falling.

 _Don’t freeze, idiot,_ she told herself, and leaned forward and kissed Mary Jane Watson.

It was awkward, upside-down, and she wasn’t exactly practiced at doing this even rightside-up, but oh _wow_ MJ’s mouth was soft. Her hands came up to cup Gwen’s cheeks and she tilted her head and kissed her back, her nose brushing Gwen’s chin, and then she said, “come down, Tigress, let's do this properly,” murmured low against her mouth.

Gwen dropped to the floor so fast she wasn't entirely sure it was a voluntary action or just all the muscles in her body scrambling to do as she was told.

It was—harder to get up off the floor than she expected.

“Gwen?” MJ knelt next to her, looking worried. “You okay?”

“I've had kind of a long day,” Gwen said apologetically. “Uh. Days. Had my atoms scrambled. Took a few hits from hot Doc Ock.”

MJ looked like she didn’t know whether to laugh or call an ambulance. “Hot Doc Ock.”

Gwen waved a hand. “If you like older woman,” she said. “Also I'm pretty sure she was sleeping with Peter's aunt.”

MJ took this in surprising stride. “You know, May has always given me a bi vibe.”

Gwen pushed herself up so she was leaning on her elbows. _“Everyone_ gives you a bi vibe.”

MJ reached up and pulled the towel off her head, shaking her damp hair down around her face. “You going to sit there and tell me I'm wrong, Gwendolyne?”

“Never,” murmured Gwen, and MJ grinned as she leaned down to kiss her.

Somehow between the two of them they managed to haul Gwen up onto MJ's bed so she could lie in a tired heap there, instead, MJ propped up on an elbow at her side. “So what was the second thing?”

Gwen blushed. “That—that was the second thing, that I. Wanted to do that. And that me telling you, it’s.” She took a breath. “It’s _right_ , that I’m Spider-Woman and that. You know that.”

“But I already did know it,” said MJ, “and I was pretty sure about the kissing thing, too, but never sure _enough,_ you know?”

Gwen made a face. “Was I really so obvious? Wait, why didn’t you say anything? Or just—”

“Two reasons,” MJ said, trailing a finger down the side of Gwen's face. “First, I didn't want to spook you. Ever since—you know. You've pulled back, even more than you were already. I was afraid I'd push too hard, scare you off.”

Gwen rolled her eyes. “I'm not a horse, MJ, and I'm not that skittish, I go out there regularly to punch guys five times my size--”

“That's point number two,” MJ said, tapping her on the nose. “You're _Spider-Woman._ That's heavy, you know? And if there was any chance that my—” she wrinkled her nose, “attentions could have been unwanted, or another thing for you to have to bear—I wasn't going to do that to you, add to your weight.” She shrugged. “Better I keep my silence and help you lift that weight however I can, as your friend.”

Her eyes were cautious and warm and hopeful and Gwen loved her, loved her, loved her.

“Anyway,” MJ said, flipping her _earnestness_ switch efficiently off, “you haven't in fact told me anything new, and I feel I'm owed two pieces of new info. Gimme the juicy Gwen goss.”

“Surely the hot Doc Ock counts as one thing,” Gwen protested.

MJ laughed. “Fine, fine. Just one, then.”

Gwen opened her mouth to say, _you stop straightening out your curls in the future_ or _Norman Osborne sucks in every universe_ or even _I learned to play drums to get close to you_ but she hadn't quite shaken off the ghosts of other worlds, couldn't quite stop the fountain of truth now uncovered and what came out of her mouth was, “it was my fault.”

MJ looked surprised. “You're going to have to be more specific--”

“Peter,” she said. “I—I killed him.”

MJ’s eyes went wide, and Gwen slammed hers shut, unable to face any version of the sorrow she’d seen in the other Mary Jane. Not this close. Not when it was her fault. “I didn’t know it was him,” she explained, her voice thick. “He’d taken something—Dr. Connor’s serum—and he’d changed. He was violent, out of control, not himself, and. And then I hit him.” She swallowed. “And he changed back.”

There was so much more she could say, so much she could apologize for, whole worlds full of Peters and MJ's with futures together, a whole unspooling fate that Gwen had robbed her of. But how cruel, how cruel to reveal that future only after it had been destroyed. It was kindness, not selfishness, not to tell her. Right?

“May and my aunt Anna were close,” Mary Jane said, her voice distant, dreamy, or maybe that was the blood rushing in Gwen’s ears. “Are close, I guess, though it’s harder now. We used to have these stupid family dinners every six months or so, but the ages were never right for us to really be _friends,_ Pete and I. I didn’t have the common interests with him that you did—I always thought he was kind of aloof, and I’m sure he thought I was a total airhead, but.”

Gwen opened her eyes. MJ was so close, her eyes so calm.

“I knew Peter,” she said firmly. “Not like you did, I know that, but maybe that helps, maybe that distance is what lets me know. He was brilliant, and jealous, and _good._ He would have hated what he became. A mindless thing, a violent thing, hurting the people that he loves—” she shook her head. “You did what you had to do. And if he could, he'd thank you for it.”

Gwen licked her lips, wondering if that were true. If she'd told Peter B. the whole story, or Noir, or any of them, what would they have said? She could almost hear it in Noir’s voice: _Don't worry about it, we're all accidental murderers in our own way._

“I know it's a lot,” she said, rather than argue or deny. “I know it's—I really didn't mean to spring it all on you at once. If you need to take some time, process—”

“I do need to process,” MJ said, and Gwen nodded, her heart in her toes. She started to stand, but MJ reached out, grabbing her wrist. “But,” she continued, “I'd prefer to do it with you here?”

Gwen sank back to the bed in relief. “Of course,” she said. “I—of course.”

They sat on Mary Jane's bed, two girls in a pool of light, and the world slowly settled back in around her.

She was right, Gwen realized. It didn’t matter what any of the other Peters would have said. They weren’t him, weren’t her best friend, weren’t the person she’d looked up to as a scientist—as a role model—her whole life. The Peter she’d known would have done anything to save the people he loved. Including, if necessary, stopping himself, forever.

She raised her eyes to MJ’s face, remembered a wide green eye, winking. After all, in every universe, Mary Jane Watson saw Peter Parker for who he was.

MJ still hadn't let go of her hand, and as Gwen let herself sink into a kind of exhausted relief, she brought it up to her lips, brushing a kiss across her knuckles.

Somehow this, more than their mouths together, more than talking about what they wanted, this made everything she'd done tonight real. The soft press of MJ's lips against a place that only a few hours ago had connected with Tombstone's jaw brought Gwen up into a kind of singing note of clarity. She was Spider-Woman, and this was her Mary Jane.

“Also,” said Gwen into the silence between them, “I met a talking pig.”

MJ laughed against her skin.

**Author's Note:**

> This is likely the first of several during/post itsv scenes from me for various characters, because it's the best movie all time. Stay tuned.


End file.
